Open Source at Blinkist: Just like all cool Startups Blinkist will not reinvent the wheel and reuse as much open source components as possible and only implement the core business pieces by it’s own developers. That way the 12 members of the dev. team at Blinkist stay agile, productive and more focused. For the usage of open source components there is a license policy at Blinkist.

Venture Capital Investment as „Trigger“: During the last fundraising period the VCs requested a detailed due diligence report, especially for the IP rights of the software and the used 3rd party dependencies of it. Instead of manually checking each 3rd party dependency (open source components) and manually seeking for each license and writing down the results into an Excel sheet, the Blinkist team decided to use the VersionEye software for the reporting.

VersionEye at Blinkist:

VersionEye automatically generated an inventory list of all used 3rd party dependencies, including open source and closed source components.

VersionEye showed which of the used components are outdated and which are the new versions.

VersionEye compared the licenses of all the 3rd party dependencies with a license whitelist and generated a PDF report of all used software licenses in the organization.

VersionEye checked all open source components for known security vulnerabilities and generated a PDF report for that.

„Thanks to VersionEye we could generate an open source inventory list for our investors, which included all the open source and closed source licenses. That way we saved a lot of time & money. Beside that one time report we use VersionEye now as a service to ensure continuously that our 3rd party dependencies are aligned with our license policy.”Holger Seim (CEO) @ Blinkist

Why Blinkist is using VersionEye:

Instead of manually searching for 3rd party licenses VersionEye can generate an inventory list with all licenses automatically.

For the investors the inventory list with the licenses could be exported as a PDF report.

Now VersionEye is part of the daily development process at Blinkist and notifies the developers in real time about:

Outdated versions

License violations

Security vulnerabilities

„VersionEye is not just a one time solution for a due diligence. It is deeply integrated in our development process and notifies us continuously about license violations, security vulnerabilities and outdated dependencies. The feature to generate an open source inventory list, with all licenses, any time, as PDF report, makes our investors very happy.“Tobias Balling (CTO) @ Blinkist

VersionEye is a service for continuous open source monitoring:

It is open source itself

Monitors more than 1 million open source projects in the internet on a daily basis